Apple executive involved in multi-touch, Touch ID, Face ID, and Vision Pro is leaving،
The name Steve Hotelling may not mean anything to you, but you probably know many of the inventions he worked on at Apple.
Bloomberg reports that Hotelling is leaving Apple after a long and illustrious career. He helped create several important features that are used on many of Apple's most important products today. Multi-touch was one, for example.
You may remember Steve Jobs introducing the
iPhone on January 9, 2007 when he said, “And we invented a new technology called multi-touch that is phenomenal. It works like magic. You don't need a stylus. It's much more precise. than any touchscreen ever delivered. He ignores unintentional touches, he's super smart. You can gesture with multiple fingers on it and, boy, did we patent it.
Of course, multi-touch technology is the reason we can pinch and zoom on our smartphones. It became a key feature for the iPhone early on before eventually coming to Android devices. Apple sued HTC in 2010 over 20 patents that Apple claimed HTC had infringed with its smartphones. One of these patents was for multi-touch. Apple and HTC settled two years later, with HTC agreeing to license the patents.
Steve Hotelling worked on multi-touch, unveiled here by Steve Jobs in 2007
If Hotelling had worked on multi-touch and nothing else, he could have left Apple knowing that he helped create an important technology used in all smartphones today. But he also helped create Touch ID, the first reliable fingerprint scanner on a phone. Motorola's Atrix 4G was the first smartphone of the touchscreen era to include a fingerprint scanner; the phone was released in 2011 and set back smartphone-based fingerprint scanners by two years.
In 2012, Apple purchased biometric security company AuthenTec for $356 million, and Touch ID debuted the following year on the iPhone 5s. Hotelling also worked on the secure 3D facial recognition system Face ID, which debuted on the iPhone cameras who worked on developing custom image sensors. He also had a role in the development of Apple's Vision
Pro space computer, which will be released early next year.
A longtime colleague told Bloomberg that “No one was more brilliant than Steve.” He rose through the ranks to vice president of Apple, where he reported to Johny Srouji, the company's senior vice president of hardware technologies, and he leaves Apple as executive director responsible for hardware technologies. touch screen, health sensors and Face ID. Several veteran Apple executives on Srouji's team will pick up where Hotelling left off.
